Middle East Edition of Connected In Cairo Now Available

Connected in Cairo is featured in the October newsletter from the American University in Cairo Press, sandwiched between Matthew Jacobs’ book on the development of American foreign policy in the Middle East and Salima Ikram’s new introduction to Ancient Egypt.

The newsletter says the book is now available at the AUC bookstore in Tahrir Square. You can also order it on-line (if you live in the Middle East) here.

You can read the entire newsletter here.

The newsletter describes the book thus:

This book is an anthropological account of Egypt‘s cosmopolitan elite, the ―A and B+ classes—made up of old-money families, nouveaux riches, and many subdivisions that in their everyday life consume “transnational popular culture” emerging from spreading globalization, as they drive in Mercedes Benz cars, eat at McDonald‘s, and shop at Mango, or play Pokémon, and stay connected through their Blackberry or Apple computer.

“Part of my job was to demonstrate that in spite of their iconicity and indexicality with their counterparts abroad, McDonald‘s, computers, and other transnational goods and technologies do not replace local culture with global but become part of local culture by becoming situated in an infrastructural and social matrix that transformed them,” comments Peterson, an anthropology professor who taught at the American University in Cairo, in his epilogue.